Tony Dron looks back at the 1980s super-coupé. Head over to Classic Driver to read the remainder of the story. It’s a good one!
Audi put the wind up every other major manufacturer by unveiling the Quattro at the 1980 Geneva motor show. For a start, everybody else’s gleaming new models were overlooked by an admiring public who thought they were seeing something from another planet. Then there was the engineering which had created this high-performance, four-wheel-drive coupé.
Plenty of radically different ideas had been seen before – just think of the Wankel engine – but it was rare for such outlandish notions to be presented by a major carmaker. While most were blind alleys which could safely be ignored, the truly alarming aspect of that new Audi was the rather obvious point that it would work; and that meant it had the ability to affect the market.
